Flight MH370

underdog

ICBM said:

It still requires that although he was knowledgable enough about computers to build his own very sophisticated flight simulator, he didn't realise that deleted data could be recovered from a hard drive. Since it was on an external drive, wouldn't he just have destroyed it and dumped it somewhere it could never be traced?

There are just so many things that don't quite add up whichever theory you look at.

Like a lot of criminals could simply be that he wanted someone to discover how clever he was at some point?

ICBM

VimFuego said:

the airforce not going up is the killer for me, surely their job is to intercept and investigate any suspicious aircraft? I can see it being incompetence, but how did that not come out during the investigation? Even if it wasn't made public, surely someone would've been made to fall on his sword?

Maybe they have been, but we don't know about it. The most logical reason for hiding it is that they simply don't want anyone to know that their air defences are totally useless.

underdog said:

Like a lot of criminals could simply be that he wanted someone to discover how clever he was at some point?

But that directly contradicts wanting to make the plane disappear without trace and the level of meticulous planning necessary to make it so.

There's also the problem of if he did it, and succeeded in reaching the ditching point undetected, simply being seen by a random ship would blow the whole thing - the ocean is vast, but it's not impossible he could be unlucky. To decrease the risk he would need to have been watching the sea closely as he approached the fuel exhaustion point and then flown *back* along the previous track if it was clear. In which case the plane will be to the north of the search zone, not the south...

It's like trying to do a jigsaw where you have only some of the pieces, don't know how many the puzzle has or what the picture looks like.

crunchman

Presumably, the flight data recorder batteries will be dead by now, so finding it is highly unlikely.

Haych

crunchman said:

Presumably, the flight data recorder batteries will be dead by now, so finding it is highly unlikely.

They’re designed to give off a ping for only a few days/weeks I think, so yes the batteries are well dead by now. I think this was brought out in the early days after the disappearance - the fact that locating the plane on the sonar pings from the black boxes had a very limited time window. 

danishbacon

crunchman said:

Presumably, the flight data recorder batteries will be dead by now, so finding it is highly unlikely.

I think they recovered the Air France ones two years after the crash once locating the debris field (which was apparently quite compact). If MH370 burst into tiny fragments, that might be a harder task.

Cirrus

Freebird said:

For it to make any sense in my mind, the fire itself would have to get out of control almost instantaneously, at precisely the moment the captain was switching between international air trafic controllers. That's a big ask for my internal logic processing, so from that moment onwards it's all a mystery to me. However, I wouldn't rule out a fire without a deeper examination of the facts, as we are relying on the author of article to inform us what happened (a pilot himself).

The thing to remember about these kind of aviation disasters is that for something like this to happen, several things typically have to go wrong at once. It's an industry filled with double checks, backup systems, robust procedures worked out over years, and contingency planning. So for something like MH370, it's likely it would never have so totally vanished off the face of the earth without some element of coincidence - an unlikely problem compounded by at least one other unlikely problem. If you believe there are alternate universes, for every one where MH370 vanishes there are millions or billions where it completed its flight as planned and the world never even heard about it. There might be thousands or millions where MH370 crashed but left enough clues to find it - someone sees it go down, someone gets a radio or mobile message out...

Freebird

Haych said:

VimFuego said:

will have another read, didn't see it 1st time.

Another thing that occurred to me, why did he fly the plane over the ocean? I saw in the article that it may have been so it didn't crash into a populated area, but he's already happy to kill the crew and passengers. And why did he wait for the fuel to run out? He could've just crashed it the 1st chance he had, say when the 1st officer left the flight deck. And giving the passengers 7 hours to try and get in seems chancy, I understand the doors can be locked, but I'm sure after 7 hours they'd be looking pretty weak on the hinges.

EDIT: for me there are too many questions about the suicide theory for me to accept it, just doesn't stack up. The electrical fire explanation has fewer questions, and answers many of uhe ones I have.

That’s the part I can’t quite fathom. If you’re on a murder suicide mission why would you be bothered about people on the ground in the first place? Why not intentionally crash the plane into the most densely populated city and take even more innocents with you? Why fly out to the ocean in sone weird act of nobility?

He actually flew over mainland Malaysia when he turned back and was on a new flightpath heading towards the Indian Ocean.

Freebird

Haych said:

Like radar being switched off and the Air Force choosing not to intercept?

As I say, I’m not a conspiracy nut but when you look at the things that don’t add up you can easily see why people start claiming the Russians did it or it was an extraordinary rendition and diverted to Diego Garcia etc etc. 

Yes, very strange that the Malaysian Air Force would turn a blind eye, so were there any persons of interest onboard who would make it worthwhile to stage an elaborate hoax?

Haych

Freebird said:

Haych said:

Like radar being switched off and the Air Force choosing not to intercept?

As I say, I’m not a conspiracy nut but when you look at the things that don’t add up you can easily see why people start claiming the Russians did it or it was an extraordinary rendition and diverted to Diego Garcia etc etc. 

Yes, very strange that the Malaysian Air Force would turn a blind eye, so were there any persons of interest onboard who would make it worthwhile to stage an elaborate hoax?

Or even cargo?

ICBM

danishbacon said:

If MH370 burst into tiny fragments, that might be a harder task.

It probably didn't. From the flaperon and other debris that has been recovered, it's more likely that it hit the water in a relatively low-speed and possibly fairly successful ditching, probably right wing first. This also of course would imply that someone was at the controls at the very end. The likelihood is that the aircraft broke into a few large parts but did not completely disintegrate, meaning that the number of pieces of floating debris was small.

That is, assuming that the debris is not planted as Jeff Wise thinks...

ICBM

Jeff Wise has updated his blog with a response to the Atlantic article now.

http://jeffwise.net/2019/06/28/onezero-the-mystery-behind-the-missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-isnt-solved-yet/#more-6042

Complete conspiracy nut, or does he have some valid suspicions?

One question he doesn't seem to want to ask now is that if the plane went to Kazakhstan, where is it? How was it landed and either hidden or disposed of secretly in a country which, while large and relatively sparsely-populated, is not *that* empty - and it would require at least dozens, probably hundreds, of people - and probably weeks - to either hide or completely dismantle an airliner that size.

Wise's first theory was that it went to a remote corner of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and landed on the runway originally intended for the Buran space shuttle - and was then subsequently somehow disposed of in a plot of land which was unaccountably cleared at the same time as MH370 disappeared, even though there appears no reason any effort would have been taken to demolish a derelict compound out there... so why was it?

http://jeffwise.net/2015/02/23/what-went-on-at-yubileyniy/

It does look suspiciously convincing at first. There's just one slight problem - MH370 apparently didn't quite have the range to reach Baikonur.

There's also another question you would need to ask, if he was on the right track... why is he still alive? Or would the risk of killing him be that it made his theory look more credible?

Nevertheless, it is odd that an abandoned corner of a disused airfield was so carefully cleared *just then*, isn't it?

Emp_Fab

Why on Earth would anyone want to steal a plane full of people ?

markslade07

Emp_Fab said:

Why on Earth would anyone want to steal a plane full of people ?

Especially one with such poor mpg

darthed1981

Emp_Fab said:

Why on Earth would anyone want to steal a plane full of people ?

They wouldn't...

Always the problem with conspiracy theories, they always ignore the obvious problem that the simplest explanation is usually the best.

sixstringsupplies

ICBM said:

Jeff Wise has updated his blog with a response to the Atlantic article now.

http://jeffwise.net/2019/06/28/onezero-the-mystery-behind-the-missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-isnt-solved-yet/#more-6042

Complete conspiracy nut, or does he have some valid suspicions?

One question he doesn't seem to want to ask now is that if the plane went to Kazakhstan, where is it? How was it landed and either hidden or disposed of secretly in a country which, while large and relatively sparsely-populated, is not *that* empty - and it would require at least dozens, probably hundreds, of people - and probably weeks - to either hide or completely dismantle an airliner that size.

Wise's first theory was that it went to a remote corner of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and landed on the runway originally intended for the Buran space shuttle - and was then subsequently somehow disposed of in a plot of land which was unaccountably cleared at the same time as MH370 disappeared, even though there appears no reason any effort would have been taken to demolish a derelict compound out there... so why was it?

http://jeffwise.net/2015/02/23/what-went-on-at-yubileyniy/

It does look suspiciously convincing at first. There's just one slight problem - MH370 apparently didn't quite have the range to reach Baikonur.

There's also another question you would need to ask, if he was on the right track... why is he still alive? Or would the risk of killing him be that it made his theory look more credible?

Nevertheless, it is odd that an abandoned corner of a disused airfield was so carefully cleared *just then*, isn't it?

Haven’t they found the odd bit of debris on Reunion Island (east of Africa in the Indian Ocean) that was 99% confirmed as being from MH370? If thats true, and it has supposedly been “confirmed” depending on the source, then the only likely explanation is the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean having ran out of fuel. 

There are loads of theories on MH370, one being that MH17 that was shot down over Ukraine 2 months later was actually MH370. 

Regardless, it’s bewildering. Every air disaster gets solved, we always find out what happened to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  That’s  the thing with this case, 5 years later and the general public are none the wiser. The Air France flight 447 took a few years to completely solve. Not sure we’ll ever know with mh370. 
 

ICBM

sixstringsupplies said:

Haven’t they found the odd bit of debris on Reunion Island (east of Africa in the Indian Ocean) that was 99% confirmed as being from MH370? If thats true, and it has supposedly been “confirmed” depending on the source, then the only likely explanation is the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean having ran out of fuel.

Not at all - if you read more of Wise’s blog you’ll find he thinks the debris found in the Indian Ocean was all planted. Because -

1. About half of it has been found by just one person - that person having connections to Russia - and are pieces small enough to fit in a suitcase. Two of the pieces were apparently found live on TV while he was being filmed, which is extraordinarily unlikely... unless he knew exactly where to find them.

2. The one really big piece - the flaperon - had its serial number label conveniently missing, and the pattern of barnacle growth on it is inconsistent with how it would have floated at sea. In fact the pattern of barnacle growth on *all* the pieces is inconsistent with the time they’re meant to have spent at sea.

sixstringsupplies said:

There are loads of theories on MH370, one being that MH17 that was shot down over Ukraine 2 months later was actually MH370.

No, but I’m unsure whether it’s been definitely ruled out that any of the debris could be parts of MH17 recovered from the crash site - unless the identical piece can be proven to be in Ukraine I don’t see how it could be, since the two planes were from the same production run and any simple fragment with no identifying numbers could be from either plane.

To be clear, I find it far-fetched - it would require a huge and very well-organised conspiracy if the two crashes are linked. But even so, I have to admit that some of it is troubling and difficult to rationally explain.

sixstringsupplies

We shall see @ICBM (I hope we will find out the truth anyway)

FWIW I’m very open minded and my brother calls me “Tin foil Hat-ty) I spend a lot of my spare time watching all sorts on YouTube. Personally, I think the plane downed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, but this conclusion was only reached after the discovery of debris on Reunion Island, until then, all sorts of possibilities. 

ICBM

sixstringsupplies said:

We shall see @ICBM (I hope we will find out the truth anyway)

FWIW I’m very open minded and my brother calls me “Tin foil Hat-ty) I spend a lot of my spare time watching all sorts on YouTube. Personally, I think the plane downed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, but this conclusion was only reached after the discovery of debris on Reunion Island, until then, all sorts of possibilities. 

So do I on balance, but there are still a lot of things that don't add up. Until some of the stuff Wise is on about can be conclusively debunked his theory has to remain a possibility, even though some of it does follow the well-worn conspiracist path of adding another layer of conspiracy to explain things that have disproved the original conspiracy theory.

Unfortunately I think that if we are correct, and the plane *is* in the South Indian Ocean but was simply missed by the search for one reason or another - miscalculation of the possible end point, determination by a suicidal captain to thoroughly cover his tracks, or just bad luck that it's in a part of the sea floor too difficult to search - then it won't be found in our lifetimes.